Buff the Brands – 50 billboards altered (Bristol, UK)

Who should have the Right to the City? Graffiti writers? Advertisers? Neither or both?

In Bristol, one artist’s contribution to the #SubvertTheCity week of action was to paint over all the brand names on billboards with grey paint – in the same style that Bristol City Council paint over graffiti tags. In total, around 50 billboards in Bristol were altered in this way.

The artists left a note on many of the billboards:

“Adverts pump our collective subconscious full of hollow aspirations invented by corporate marketing companies to sell us more stuff, and the city continues to welcome them. In contrast to this, when individuals write on walls the council think it better to cover them with ugly, badly painted rectangles and blobs of dirty gray, and prosecute the people involved.”

An example of Bristol City Council’s covering of graffiti using grey paint.